SIU system faces potential split as campuses argue over funds

Sunday

EDWARDSVILLE — Mathematics professor Marcus Agustin spends a lot of time inside the student fitness center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, but he's no gym rat.

Agustin and other faculty have been crammed in the gym facility for four years while waiting for construction on new classrooms and offices to be finished. The process was supposed to take two years, but Illinois state budget cuts doubled the time frame.

"But the good thing is our group is the most athletic faculty now," Agustin said.

That cramped feeling in Edwardsville, made possible by its steady growth, is conspicuously absent at Southern Illinois University's flagship campus in Carbondale, where student enrollment has dropped by thousands over the last decade. Consecutive years of state budget cuts mixed with student disenchantment, high administrative turnover, and a successful sister campus to the north seeking more resources gives Carbondale the feel of a campus under siege.

"It's been a perfect storm kind of thing," said Ahmad Fakhoury, an associate professor in Carbondale's College of Agricultural Sciences.

Talk of splitting the two campuses into independent universities has come and subsided in the past, but a recent SIU Board of Trustees decision not to allocate Edwardsville a bigger piece of the state funding they share may have just pushed the system to a tipping point.

The board last month narrowly rejected a proposal to take $5 million from Carbondale's budget to give to Edwardsville. It means SIU Carbondale will continue with about 60 percent of the system's share of state funding, despite having just slightly more students than Edwardsville, after enrollment dropped nearly one-third since 2001.

SIUE's enrollment hasn't boomed in the way Carbondale's enrollment has imploded, but steady growth over time has put Edwardsville in a position to eventually overtake Carbondale. In 2000, fall enrollment at Edwardsville was 12,193 compared to 22,645 at Carbondale (excluding the School of Medicine in Springfield) — a difference of 10,452 students. In 2017, fall enrollment at Edwardsville was 13,796 compared to 14,184 at Carbondale — a difference of just 388.

Now the Illinois Legislature is mulling a bill to split the universities, which Edwardsville leaders are outspoken in supporting. SIUE Chancellor Randall Pembrook said the proposal would also shake up the state funding formula, potentially getting Edwardsville four times more than the $5 million they asked for from trustees.

"I think the most important thing is for SIUE to be recognized for the good things that are happening here," Pembrook said. "The current situation is not equitable."

Splitting the universities would not only change the funding structure but, as in divorce, could result in a change of custody. The SIU School of Medicine in Springfield is part of the Carbondale university but would fall into Edwardsville's sphere along with the schools of pharmacy, nursing and dental medicine, under the House proposal.

This prospect is especially concerning to Carbondale leaders, who say the medical school is "deeply interconnected with the Carbondale campus," according to Chancellor Carlo Montemagno.

"The medical school is an integral part of SIU Carbondale and must remain so," Montemagno said in a blog post.

Carbondale leaders have asked for patience and more time to right the ship. There's also a sense of enmity against SIUE for how it sought to change the state funding distribution.

"The Carbondale campus didn't see any details about the rationale for the funding at all until it was released to the public," SIU Carbondale spokeswoman Rae Goldsmith said. "What we saw was a proposal that had been developed by Edwardsville using Edwardsville's interpretation of data without the help of an external consultant."

Goldsmith also said the funding change would have taken effect July 1, leaving Carbondale little time to adjust to the change. After having nine chancellors since 2000, the university hired Montemagno in August 2017. Goldsmith said having a permanent hire in leadership is allowing Carbondale to finally do long-term planning that had been delayed.

"It would have had a significant impact on the institution and the community," she said. "Losing the funding at this point while trying to turn things around, which we're hard at work on, is also an issue for us."

Montemagno's administration is working on a restructuring of academic programs and other elements of campus life under a plan called "Vision 2025." Whether the two campuses are part of the same system by that time and what effect the split has on Montemagno's plans is anyone's guess.

Plans remain tentative for the Board of Trustees to hire an external consultant to examine the funding distribution, even as the Legislature considers rendering the process moot. Democratic state Rep. Jay Hoffman of Swansea, sponsor of the bill to split the campuses, said he thinks both campuses would benefit from having their own board of trustees.

"They could focus on the strengths of the individual campuses and provide better governance for both," Hoffman said.

But Hoffman didn't shirk from describing the relationship between Edwardsville and Carbondale as one full of "parochial disputes where one campus (Edwardsville) is suffering at the expense of the other."

The legislative proposal awaits action in the Rules Committee. The Legislature's spring session ends May 31. Hoffman said the bill could be revisited in the fall if no action is taken this term.

The bill is House Bill 5861.

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